Cat Byers wins the Elizabeth Longford Brief Lives 2025 Award for younger writers

We are thrilled to announce that Cat Byers has won the Elizabeth Longford Brief Lives 2025 Award for younger writers with an essay on Clovis Pierre, poet and city morgue official in nineteenth-century Paris!

Professor Sir Simon Schama presented Catriona Byers, who recently completed a PhD at King’s College London, with the £2000 Award at the Elizabeth Longford Night of History this evening on 26th January, at the National Portrait Gallery. Her winning essay will be published in a forthcoming issue of the online Times Literary Supplement.

The Chair of Judges said,

‘The Brief Lives Award attracted a varied and imaginative range of entries, but Catriona Byers’s account of Clovis Pierre’s life stood out for its stylistic panache, acute sense of historical context, and exacting research into a fascinating corner of forgotten history. Her essay vividly profiles a time and a place and highlights the significance of obscure and disregarded figures; it promises to inaugurate a distinguished writing career.’

Catriona Byers, Elizabeth Longford Brief Lives 2025 Award winner, writes:

‘I’ve been researching the nineteenth century Paris morgue for almost a decade, and wanted to give Clovis Pierre, one of its keepers, his own moment in the spotlight as the subject of my Elizabeth Longford Brief Lives 2025 essay. His duties included identifying tens of thousands of corpses brought there. How do you cope with seeing so much death and tragedy without becoming impossibly hardened? I am absolutely thrilled that my essay has been chosen as the winner of this inaugural Award, and very grateful to the distinguished Elizabeth Longford jury for giving me this opportunity to share Clovis Pierre’s story.’

Read the full press release here.